Layer -1, the Trust Layer

The Trust Layer is the cornerstone of the NetX network and is responsible for establishing and upholding trust within the ecosystem. Its primary component, Trias, is to enable efficient trust evaluation among all participating nodes. A critical challenge in the current Internet landscape is that, before communication, two nodes need to understand each other's genuine software capability. This information gap is the bedrock for most of the cybersecurity risks on the Internet. Our vision paints a scenario in which any two Internet nodes can comprehensively comprehend the programs they've executed or intended to run and how they handle transmitted and received data.

Trias builds consensus on the trustworthiness of each node connecting to the network. Trustworthiness means whether the node runs the genuine version of the declared software stack, including the operating systems, system libraries, applications, etc. Trias implements three critical procedures:

1. Trusted Attestation and Verification. Trias enforces Trusted Computing protocols to allow each node to examine its connecting nodes' trustworthiness. After identifying the genuine software stack running on the nodes, the nodes' properties will be revealed by getting the metadata of each loaded software. The integrity metadata of these properties is stored in the Trias Ledger for further verifications.

2. Verification Gossip. After verifications, each node executes gossip protocols to share its knowledge of a target node with its neighbours, i.e. its closely communicated peers. According to the communication topology, a node may also share the knowledge with other nodes who will primarily benefit from this knowledge. When receiving the verification results, the peer also re-iterates the results. This p2p gossip ripples around the network, allowing most nodes to understand the new updates to any node's properties. This gossip ultimately constructs a web-of-trust, wherein the behaviour of each node is inspected by other nodes on the web.

3. PoET Consensus. In the Trias Network, a consensus of Proof-of-Embedded-Trust on every node is built. In sociology, embeddedness emphasises the interconnection between individuals, groups, and larger social structures, highlighting how these elements are mutually dependent and shape each other. It plays a significant role in determining the trustworthiness of a person or a group of people. Similarly, Trias builds the Embedded Trust model for each node to represent how its behaviour changes will ripple through the network to determine whether the node or a group of nodes will behave trustily given the position of web-of-trust they are in.